STACEY WIEDOWER - The Daily News -

As the new board chair for MPACT Memphis, Audra Bares is at the helm of a big initiative – one in which she has a vested interest.

“We’re in the middle of making a pretty big strategic shift in the organization, said Bares, 27. “Not so much a mission shift, but a strategic shift in how we execute our mission.”

Since MPACT Memphis launched in 2001, its mission has been to engage and support the city’s growing network of young professionals with the hope of keeping them in the city.

“Presently our contribution to the community is to help stop the ‘brain drain,’ which refers to the fact that Shelby County has been losing five young professionals per day for the last 20 years,” Bares said. “That’s not only reducing the number of young professionals in the community, but it’s also adversely affecting the middle class and creating a bigger gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

From the start, MPACT has worked under the assumption that if it provided members of the 20-something and 30-something set with ways to get involved and invested in the city, those young professionals just might stick around to become future community leaders.

But that hasn’t been working, and finding out why has been MPACT’s biggest goal and challenge in recent years.

“So we’re trying to take a broader approach,” Bares said. “Instead of focusing on the social connections that need to be made between young professionals, we want to actually start affecting some of the external factors contributing to brain drain.”

The group kicked off that initiative with Voice of MPACT, a three-phase survey project MPACT launched in July 2009. The project is still in the analysis phase, Bares said, but the survey produced some surprising results.

“We did this because nobody had ever really asked young professionals, ‘OK, why are you guys leaving?’” she said. “What we found is that it’s not necessarily about ‘not enough stuff to do,’ which is kind of what we thought. It’s more about having a clean city and having a safe city and having room for professional growth – not just a company to work for but a network of companies to grow and expand your career, because people don’t stay at the same company forever.”

Through the Voice of MPACT project, Bares said, the group hopes to effect a gradual shift in the landscape of the community to make it a more attractive place for young professionals to stay and settle down.

To do this, the group must take its work to a new level.

“MPACT needs to start expanding our programs to tackle some of these issues from a policy standpoint,” Bares said. “Not that we want to get in the business of creating public policy, but we do want to help young professionals get involved in policy decisions.”

She said the MPACT board wants to encourage more young professionals to attend city meetings and get involved on boards and commissions in areas that interest them.

“We don’t have young people represented,” Bares said. “If we want to be making decisions that affect all young professionals or our future, we need to have people on those boards and commissions.”

The group is also working to find new ways to partner with local businesses to improve the professional landscape for prospective employees and their employers.

Bares, a native Memphian, attended college at Vanderbilt University and didn’t expect to settle down in her hometown. In fact, it was MPACT Memphis that influenced her own decision to return.

During a summer internship in Memphis, Bares was invited to attend an “MPACT 101” orientation session. From that first interaction with the organization, she was hooked.

“I wasn’t interested at that point in coming back to Memphis after college,” she said. “That was the first time I realized there was more to Memphis than just the suburb where I grew up.”

And now Bares, a product marketing specialist with Medtronic Inc., has served on the MPACT board for more than four years in various leadership roles.

She’s passionate about helping others find a connection to the city in the same way she did.

“A lot of college students don’t consider Memphis as a good place to start their careers,” she said. “We want to talk to them about why that is and explain to them that this place is unique.

“We think that if people understood that – understood that it’s not just your degree but it’s who you know and how that can help your career – it would help Memphis.”